iceland adventure

Message from Becky Yee

I am just back in Tokyo from my shoot to Iceland. What an amazing country!! It is the closest thing to the center of the earth that I can think of. The landscape in Iceland is just like bjorks music, raw, untamed and wild energy. They earth is just cracking open and stuff spews out of it, steam rising from the ground, the geysers (geysir is a town in Iceland and the origin of the word) you really hear the earth thump like a heart beat, a deep resonating beat from the belly of the earth and then hot water gushes out 30 meters into
the air. One geyser they tried to find the bottom of it but haven't reachedthe bottom. The locals believe it reaches to the center of the earth! Needless to say these people are deep.

Speaking of the Icelandic people, They are really wonderful there. Total individualists and lover of the arts and music but also wild and crazy (from their Viking origins) when they get drunk as they often do, they are nuts, as the Icelandic contribution to the English language is the word "bezerk" they really
get wild and the club Sirikus in the capital of Reykjavik can attest to that craziness.

One girl wanted to dance on a table, so she stepped up on a chair, then
kicked everyone's drinks off the table, glass crashing down and littering
the floor and then she started to dance and was so drunk she fell off the table into the people sitting at the table adjacent to the one she was dancing on. Didn't apologize and no one minded. She just got up and right back on to the table and started dancing again. It looked like something out of the movie "Gladiators" after the soldiers just won the war.

I heard other stories, one was of some guy who was so belligerent when he was drunk his friend tried to hold him down and straddled his body so as to pin his body and arms down to the ground to calm him down. His friend who was pinned down responded by biting the
face of the friend trying to help and giving him a few stitches on his lip. There are no hard feelings and they are still friends as the one who was pinned down said, "What did you expect me to do? It was my only choice in the matter! Anyway, we clinked
glasses afterwards and drank on till the morning."

Iceland also has amazing northern lights or aurora borealis. I have never photographed the aurora borealis but did my geeky nerdy thing and looked it
up on the web. The photos came out fine, I used the formula 400 ASA provia
4.5 for 1 minute. The northern lights are an amazing thing to see and was on
my list of things to do before I die. So happy I can scratch that one off my
list.

Icelandic people also strongly believe in elves, fairies and rock trolls or as they call them "The hidden people," who live in a parallel universe, but share the same land and space. According to the Icelandic lore, the various hidden people (about 12 different races) speak Icelandic and travel to Norway (why no one knows). They have tons of stories about all construction machinery breaking b/c they are trying to destroy a rock that is in the way, but then just resolve to build the road around the rock and then the equipment works fine.

Here is a picture of me by the blue lagoon (hot spring/onsen) next to what I believe to be a rock trolls house.